[Imc-web] Advertising

[Mike Lehman]

This is just a heads up that the spamming of the website with 
advertising is getting out of hand. Whoever is doing it is now hitting 
us with dozens, and now, or even hundreds of these pieces of electronic 
excrement daily. I removed somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred over 
th course of the day yesterday and then had to delete 9 pages worth (on 
the editoral screen) this morning.

Last week I took a crude survey of other US IMC's to see how this was 
affecting them. Oddly, despite the large number of IMCs now using Dada, 
only Arkansas IMC and ours seem to be targetted (unless there are other 
editors spending just as much time deleting this shit as I am.) While it 
  seems confined to taking over our recent comments page, it is getting 
pretty obnoxious and is sorely in need of a technical fix to solve.

The only (crude) thing that I can think of that would start to address 
the problem is to disable the "View Comments" page. I am not sure this 
will do much, but it will certainly conceal what does occur until the 
mess can be periodically wiped away. perhaps discouraging the idoit whop 
somehow may think this will bring in customers. Or perhaps it is one of 
our old enemies, just trying to make things difficult for us under these 
false pretenses.

Obviously, in the long run a technical fix within Dada needs to occur. I 
would greatly appreciate it if someone qualified could start looking 
into this ASAP. At the very least, we need to see if the possibility of 
using IP blocking is a viable option. I want to formally request 
authorization to do so at this week's Steering meeting. What do people 
think?
Mike Lehman